Salt Blood
by euphyme
Summary: Pirate, indeed. A character study of Elizabeth Swann, Pirate King. AU.


**Salt Blood**

Elizabeth Swann never was one for convention. Jack Sparrow (_captain_) had been right about many things and wrong about even more, but he had known.

_Pirate_.

The word never instilled in her the sense of dread it did in others. Her father, James Norrington, even Will – only ever moved by notions of treasure – spat out the word like an insult but Elizabeth never learned how to use it as a curse, a slur hurled fearfully through bared teeth. To the governor's daughter it was so much more than that, more than gold and plunder and parley. More even than adventure. After all, her namesake was a bird. The corsets always were too tight.

She loved Will with all she thought she was, had willingly thrown herself under Jones's sword for him. _To sacrifice is to love_. And sacrifice she did. The maelstrom howled around them and she was soaked to the bone, limp on the wood pounding with the pirates' footsteps or the heart lying naked beside her, salt water mixing with blood – _her _blood, ruby red - in swirling patterns that snaked over the wooden deck, as though with purpose of its own. Moments later it was washed away by the sea and she knew then what she had always known, that she belonged to the sea and it was now time for that beautiful terrifying mistress to reclaim its own. Will was clinging to her and saying things in a desperate voice, with feverish words that escaped her because she was looking at Jack and they both knew what had to happen if she was to live. The kohl-black eyes found hers and a rough hand she knew well guided her failing fingers to cool metal.

(She always felt better with a blade in her hand, even a broken one.)

Her blood had tasted salty. Davy Jones had screamed before surrendering himself with a tender whisper: "_Calypso."_ Jack's face was inscrutable.

"He's a blacksmith," her father had said, despairing.

"No," Elizabeth had replied, proud. "He's a pirate."

Silly girl. Jack had known, Jack had always known. Will was not the pirate – he lusted for treasure, in whichever form he fancied, but in Elizabeth he sought the governor's daughter. The governor's daughter was gone, washed away by salt water and backbreaking labour entirely unsuitable for someone of her station. The callouses on her hands told another story, the steadiness of her feet on deck spoke of experience and the fire thrumming in her blood became inescapable, addictive. It didn't come from Will, not even from Jack (whose kiss had filled her with a heat she couldn't describe). It came from her. So when the storm had settled Will had so nearly promised – ten years– but she had cut him off.

"I love you."

Is this her sacrifice? Will deserved more than once every ten years, he deserved so much more. In time, she knew that he would learn the taste of another's flesh and neither of them would return to that shore. She set him free, her first act as captain of the Flying Dutchman and only her second as Pirate King, but she knew what she was.

_Pirate_.

A pirate took what they wanted. Elizabeth Swann – Turner for only five minutes – took the sea and Jack had smiled because he had been right.

When she was a girl, Elizabeth's father – a great deal kinder than most – had fondly indulged her voracious appetite for pirate literature, stories that were gruesome and harsh but spoke of endless horizons and equality and _freedom_, that beautiful word that she kept curled tightly in her chest. She had known then that it was made for her. Perhaps that was why she had stolen the medallion tucked away in the folds of cloth on the body of a twelve year old boy, because what pirate can resist the draw of gold? She hadn't thought twice.

(_Later, she thinks how she had stolen something else from Will that day: a fate, a destiny_. _She had tied herself to him, but had gained the world. Her first theft. She never could bring herself to regret it.)_

Of course, gold wasn't the only treasure she was after. Practicalities – his station, her future as the wife of some prestigious admiral or another – be damned. Perhaps that was precisely what made the prospect so attractive. To be a wild thing.

They were thrown onto a course of events the young Elizabeth could only have dreamed of, and soon the swell of the waves in her hips and the salt that cracks on her lips and the callouses from rope and sail and plank on her once silk-soft hands began to feel like home. So when she gave up the earth and took the sea, its siren song answered, it did not feel like losing at all – despite the hollow in her chest, Elizabeth Swann felt finally whole. She didn't bury that beating thing, nor did she keep it closely guarded under lock and key. It had seen enough of cages and it, too, was reclaimed by the sea.

The barnacles do not settle on her skin as they had done Davy Jones; she cares for the souls under her protection, not only because it is her duty but because she has seen what her successor had done and she cannot let that happen again. In a world ruled by men, she learns the necessity of cruelty and name of the Pirate King becomes a fearsome one to behold but it does not destroy her. Elizabeth Swann does not become cruel. To her are delivered slaves and captives, prostitutes and women stolen from their lands and she can taste their chains. To her come those in whose wild eyes and restless souls she can feel a fight because death comes for us all but _not yet_, and to these people she offers a choice: one year of hard labour in her service to learn the feel of the waves beneath their feet and salt in their blood, and then they can be reborn. The brave ones say yes, the hungry ones and the ones who even in death are lured by the sea.

The choice is a metamorphosis. Elizabeth does not teach them to cow under her power but to learn their own. Those who leave do so stronger, like steel forged from the furnace. Their chains sink to the bottom of the sea, thousands of fathoms deep, where they rust and break and are enveloped in coral and new life. Many decide to stay.

Jack Sparrow (_captain_). Her first theft had inadvertently brought them together and still fate decides they are not done yet, because they were never bound but it seems they can never be separated. Birds of a feather, indeed. He is the freedom she read about all those years ago, made of flesh and fire and labour and leather, worn and crusty with the salt of the sea – her sea - and she wonders how does he contain it? He is not a man; she decides then that his era should never end.

Jack's eyes find the edge of the scar on her chest, peeking out from behind the folds of her shirt. She wears a hat too, now, much like his and his jeweled fingers touch his own in recognition. Kindred spirits.

"I always knew you were heartless, darling, but I did rather mean it in a more figurative than literal sense."

They are thrown together, time and time again, and soon she needs no compass to navigate Jack's flesh. She throws him back to the world because the sea without the captain would not be the same and he rewards her with a story, one for each scar and tattoo, words richer and more beautiful than any she read in the books from her childhood. It is with a strange sense of inevitability that his face barely shows any evidence of the tides of time working their magic: the Fountain of Youth, only a myth until now. Until Jack.

The Pirate King and the Captain who made her take the seas as their own.

"Pirate," he whispers against her chest, lips worshiping her skin.

Pirate, indeed.


End file.
